Manor Grove Privileged to Work With Teacher of the Year

Manor Grove is much more than a nursing home or a rehab facility, we are a genuine part of the Kirkwood area community.  This past fall, one of the opportunities that we had to interact with that community was to provide a working environment for one of Adam Scimone’s class projects.  Adam was selected as Nipher Middle School’s Teacher of the Year earlier this month, and then also selected as the overall Kirkwood School District Teacher of the Year.  His cooperative, problem solving project brought the junior high students and our residents together in an effort to enhance daily life for folks that live here.  The main focus of the project was for the students to learn how to build empathy, and find a problem through an emotional connection and come up with a way to fix it instead of simply finding a solution to a problem presented to them.  These forty 8th grade students spent one-on-one time with different residents, listening to them and hearing the things that are challenging in their lives, and then returned to the school to brainstorm real life ways to overcome those challenges.  Mr Scimone described the experience as a “Win/Win” situation as the residents enjoyed interacting with the kids, and the kids experienced some eye opening things that through the normal course of their lives, they wouldn’t have encountered.  Great thinking Mr Scimone and congratulations on your award!